Man Nears Dream Of World Games

1993 Competition To Bring Together Scholar-athletes

Man Nears Dream Of Scholar-athlete Games

Ever since taking Hartford's Trinity College basketball team to Cuba a decade ago, Daniel E. Doyle Jr. has believed in the power of sports to overcome political and cultural differences.

Now the Connecticut man is close to his dream of putting together a unique sports contest for the world's teenagers.

Undaunted by the staggering logistics, the 43-year-old former coach has set up an organization that is screening thousands of young athletes for spots at the first World Scholar-Athlete Games next year in Rhode Island.

Doyle believes the games may capture the true Olympic spirit even more than the Olympic games in Barcelona, which begin later this month.

Unlike the Olympics, the games in Rhode Island will have no national teams. Instead, athletes from different nations will compete on the same team.

Teams will compete in volleyball, basketball, soccer and doubles tennis and sailing.

Besides 1,400 athletes, nations will send 600 of their most talented teenage singers, poets, writers and artists. The games will feature an international choir as well as displays of the young artists' work.

"We have 103 countries already committed," said Doyle, who lives in West Hartford but works in Kingston, R.I., where he runs the Institute for International Sport at the University of Rhode Island.

He created the institute in 1986, partly as a result of his experience in Cuba. "We were the first team to go to Cuba since Castro was in power," he said.

While there, Doyle, then Trinity's varsity basketball coach, made lasting friendships, including one with the great Cuban Olympic runner, Alberto Juantorena.

"In sports, because of the emotion and intensity, you really get to know someone quickly," he said. "I discovered what a wonderful medium sports could be to cultivate friendships."

During the '80s, he formed the Sports Corps, which sends

Americans to work with impoverished and handicapped children abroad. c c c c He also founded Belfast United, which helps Catholic and Protestant children rise above the strife in Northern Ireland by participating on the same soccer, basketball and volleyball teams.

"They trained together, and they became friends," he said. "That was an example of how we were able to bring different factions together."

The teenage competitors who come to Rhode Island from June 20 to July 1, 1993, will not necessarily be great athletes but will be scholar-athletes, Doyle said. The games will be in Newport and Kingston. To qualify, a student must be between 16 and 19, a member of a varsity team and on the honor roll.

The scholars and athletes are nominated by officials at their schools and then must be screened by an admissions committee. "The selection process is not a whole lot different than applying to college," Doyle said.

Since mailing out application packets in March, "we have been overwhelmed by nominations," he said.

Doyle has lined up some big names to boost the games. Rhode Island Sens. Claiborne Pell and John H. Chafee have helped promote the games, including hosting a reception in Washington for the diplomatic community. Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey, the former Princeton and NBA basketball star and Rhodes Scholar, is the games' honorary chairman. The commissioner of the games is Wally Halas, former athletic director at Clark University and nephew of George Halas, the late Chicago Bears coach.

Organizers expect to announce broadcast agreements and the names of major corporate sponsors soon, Doyle said.

Doyle hopes the World Scholar-Athlete games will capture some of the idealism that started the Olympics.

The modern Olympic Games were begun by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a French aristocrat "who envisioned the games as a grand celebration of sport and culture," Doyle said. Tainted by nationalism and commercialism, "they have gotten away from that," he said.

"My theory is [Coubertin] would be appalled at how the Olympics have evolved."

Doyle was in Ireland when the 1984 Olympics were broadcast from Los Angeles. There he had a different perspective of the flag-waving and intense national pride many Americans displayed.

Although many Americans viewed the games "as a wonderful celebration of human spirit," Europeans saw it differently, he said.

"They were really critical of us in terms of pounding our chest and being arrogant and getting away from the spirit of the Olympics."

Doyle, the author of the novel "Are You Watching, Adolph Rupp?" is writing about the Olympics for his second novel. The book will track four athletes going to the Olympics and an autistic child going to the Special Olympics.

"One of the messages is that you can triumph in a variety of ways through sport," he said, "and those ways don't only include winning the gold medal.